Now that the volcanic dust has settled, it's time to get a few things out of my system. My girlfriend and I were due to fly home from Gibraltar on Sunday, having holidayed in Morocco and crossed by ferry into Spain. Our flight was cancelled, so we decided to wait it out in Tarifa to see if things changed. By Tuesday morning, European airspace was on lockdown as a second ash cloud was being reported, and so we made alternative plans. We caught a bus to Malaga, flew from there to Barcelona, and then drove 1,300 miles to Calais. In Calais, we waited in the cold for two hours, before finally boarding a ferry to Dover where we jumped on a private double-decker bus to London. You can see my route and watch my video diaries here.

It was an expensive hassle. And we were the lucky ones. Many travellers remain stranded overseas. It cost us around €350 each to get home, while others we met had paid thousands. And everyone we met seemed to have the same issues with the response to the crisis. Here are some of them:

•Everyone had their own story about being fleeced: car hire companies were charging as much as £1,800 for a day's rental. When the air-space ban was lifted on Tuesday night, we inquired about the cost of buying a British Airways flight from Barcelona to London first thing the next day. The price was £800 per person. A fleet of half-empty Jet2 coaches taking their customers from Barcelona to Calais in the early hours of Wednesday morning refused to let my girlfriend and I on board unless we paid €340. SeaFrance and P&O charged their walk-on fare of £65 for the Channel crossing. The price is £50 if you book in advance, which we obviously couldn't – so why didn't they waive the increase? Why was there not more pressure from the government for companies to freeze their prices when the crisis began?

• Nobody succeeded in dealing with the surge in demand for information and services. Companies across the travel industry failed to increase capacity on phone lines. Monarch Airlines did not answer the phone once over a period of four days, during which I attempted to call them at least 20 times a day. We met hundreds of people who had been due to fly home with Ryanair, and no one had managed to get through to a representative, despite being put on hold for long periods of time on expensive international mobile calls and premium-rate phone lines. When we arrived in Calais and deposited our hire car at 10pm on Wednesday, despite the fact that car companies had probably had the most profitable day in their histories, not one company representative was at the port. They had all gone home, and empty cars were strewn across the car parks with keys left in the ignition.

In short, while the stranded travellers of Britain showed admirable spirit in getting home however they could, the airlines, the car hire companies and the government failed to match that spirit.